Karl Bade 
XTC, PERE UBU, THE ONLY ONES AND BLONDIE are among the acts featured in in a photo exhibit of classic punks by Rebel Rebelle.
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS should have their seventh album, Love Kraft, out in August.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T: What it means may depend on who is singing about it.
FRANZ FERDINAND is letting the Scottish Green Party use the band's current single for a new party political broadcast in the UK election directed by cult film director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy).
JIMMY BUFFETT AND WARREN BUFFETT have been friends for more than 20 years and have performed together, but are apparently not related to each other.
AMERICAN IDOL: FWIW, Matt Drudge reports that Fox execs have declined to answer all questions posed by ABC News regarding claims American Idol judge Paula Abdul personally “coached” a favorite contestant and then tried to cover up the breach. ABC News apparently has audio evidence. ALSO: The Smoking Gun has the dirt on contestant Bo Bice's drug busts.
TOM AND KATIE UPDATE: The skepticism and thinly-veiled innuendo over Tom Cruise's new relationship with Katie Holmes continues at Defamer.
NEWS OF THE FUTURE: Merrill Brown, founding editor in chief of MSNBC.com and a founder of Court TV, writes: “The future course of the news, including the basic assumptions about how we consume news and information and make decisions in a democratic society, is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.” CNN honcho Jonathan Klein, who once called bloggers a bunch of guys sitting at their computers in their pajamas, seems to be figuring this out, too: “You know the blogging and the values vote and direct marketing and even fears about personal safety and homeland security have all changed the political landscape 180 degrees, and yet the mainstream media is still covering politics the way it has for the last 30 to 40 years since the Kennedy-Nixon debate.”
ROBOTS: Sony’s Qrio, a humanoid robot, has been attending a Californian nursery school for the past three months where it plays with young children in a test designed to see if robots can “live in harmony with humans in the future.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE: James Lileks has alternately uplifting and mildly depressing thoughts inspired by the movie.
CAMERON DIAZ TO WED JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE? Reports are circulating on the 'net, though they appear to all be relying on the ever-reliable News of the World. Diaz's rep denied it to E! News.
GLOBAL WARMING AND CENSORSHIP: Scientists allege that two of the world's leading scientific journals — Science and Nature — are refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. For example, one study reviewed the scientific literature to show that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.
ANN COULTER: Given that a more than a few of you checked out Time magazine's blunder in its coverage of the conservative columnist (now corrected), you may be interested to learn that she's currently dating a young Democrat, though it can't be too shocking after her run with Bob Guccione Jr. And while on the subject of Coulter hoaxes, Gawker will hook you up with the ones rated NC-17.
HITLER'S NURSE speaks, a German newspaper claims. 93-year-old Erna Flegel claims she stayed in the bunker after Hitler killed himself and was there when Soviet troops arrived. She said Hitler was so paranoid that he even suspected spies had filled his cyanide capsule with false poison.
IRAQ: American soldiers returning to their German base from Iraq are undergoing their own small “baby boom,” becoming parents in such numbers as to strain the resources of the base military hospital. The 1st Armored Division usually produces one or two babies a month at Baumholder in central Germany, but the birthrate is expected to shoot up to 40 a month in the next five months. My ex-roommate Dru Martin (who saw Pate before I did) was (and may still be) teaching kids of the 1st AD, though I believe he’s now at Rammstein. As I had just been thinking of Germany and Iraq, coming across this story was one of those moments where the cosmos just tickled my funny bone.
IRAQ II: The BBC has a dramatic slideshow of an Iraqi sandstorm from Gunnery Sergeant Shannon Aldredge, a U.S. Marine Corps photographer.
BURIED TREASURE UPDATE: A fourth man charged in the alleged buried treasure scam has been arrested. Police say Matt Ingham was part of a group of men accused of stealing a cache of old currency while doing a roofing job in Massachussetts.
DEMOCRACY IN EGYPT: Egyptian judges are joining other groups in the country in calling for reform ahead of this year's presidential elections. Over 1,000 Egyptian judges say they won't supervise upcoming elections unless they are given more independence and control.
CANADA: The Liberal government has rebounded from Adscam, causing some Tories to question the decision to call for a new election.
PETE DOHERTY UPDATE: The troubled singer's ex-galpal Katie Lewis is warning his current fiancee Kate Moss that Pete loves romps with men and women. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
NO OASIS: in an interview with NME, Liam Gallagher lashes out at Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Kaiser Chiefs, Keane and Pete Doherty, with a frantic, “I'm dancing as fast as I can” quality in advance of the new disc from Oasis at month's end. He likes Charlotte Church, though. No, really.
LIVE AID: Bob Geldof is trying to organize another Live Aid concert event.
IRAQ III: In its search for partners and intermediaries to help fight the insurgency and speed reconstruction, the U.S. military has turned to tribal Sheiks sidelined for decades under Saddam Hussein. Not surprising, given the lack of Sunni participation in the first election.
BRADGELINA UPDATE: Angelina Jolie tells Vanity Fair that she and Brad Pitt came to trust each other while taking gun training for their upcoming movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
21st CENTURY ROCK: Stereogum reprints a list of 21 albums for this century that Chuck Klosterman did for Esquire magazine.
LINKIN PARK has demanded to be released from its record contract with Warner Music Group, claiming the company's impending initial public offering is enriching investors at the expense of label artists.
LIFE ON MARS, “many scientists believe, is now more a likelihood than merely a possibility.” Or is it the work of Cruise and Spielberg?
IRAQ IV: Pfc. Lynndie England, the woman grinning and giving a thumbs-up in some of the most notorious photos to come out of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, four counts of maltreating prisoners and one count of committing an indecent act. Prosecutors agreed to drop another count of committing an indecent act and one count of dereliction of duty. She will end up spending less than 11 years in prison. Given how badly she damaged U.S. efforts in Iraq, she should count herself lucky.
IRAQ V: The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's latest recounts serious, but unsubstantiated charges against U.S. troops made by Aidan Delgado, who was discharged in January as a conscientious objector. Delgado's first claim is this: “Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads.” Michael Rubin, editor of The Middle East Quarterly, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, currently in Baghdad outside the U.S.-secured International Zone and apparently a bigger fan of Coca-Cola than I am (which is saying a lot), doesn't buy it. And Delgado has been telling different versions of other stories. Sadly, the Lynndie Englands of the world will cause some to believe such stories without any corroboration.
THE FRENCH HOTEL is eager to make the leap from sex kitten to savvy business titan. She intends to model her career after those of moguls Donald Trump and Sean “Puffy” Combs. But I don't think either of them did a hamburger commercial too pornographic to air.
THE AFL-CIO IS IN TROUBLE: President John J. Sweeney, who is facing challenges from some of the labor federation's largest member unions, last week acknowledged that the organization is financially squeezed and may have to lay off a quarter of its workforce. Four dissident union presidents have demanded that their members' names be removed from the AFL-CIO's master list of 13 million households, attacking what many consider to be organized labor's most important tool to influence political campaigns and legislative proceedings on Capitol Hill. The action by the presidents of the Service Employees International Union, Teamsters, Laborers and Unite Here is the most serious attack on Sweeney's administration. The membership of the four unions exceeds 4 million, a third of the AFL-CIO total.
OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL: Congress wants to hear from two investigators who quit the United Nations inquiry led by Paul Volcker into the Oil-for-Food scandal because they felt that it was too soft on Kofi Annan. Questions have been raised about Mr. Volcker’s impartiality by the resignation of the two investigators and by his ties to a company once run by Maurice Strong, a Canadian tycoon and diplomat under investigation by the Volcker panel.
MICHAEL KINSLEY, opinion page editor and editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, on President Bush's Social Security proposals and the politics thereof: “If privatization is truly voluntary, it can't do much harm. And if that is Mr. Bush's price for being out front on a real solution to the real problem, the Democrats should let him have it. Unless they are complete morons – always a possibility – the Democrats could end up in the best of all worlds. They know in their hearts that Social Security has to change in some unpleasant way. Mr. Bush, for whatever reason, is willing to take most of the heat. And all he wants in return is the opportunity to try something that will alienate people from the GOP for generations to come.”
D.C. DUCK UPDATE: A duck who nested at the Treasury Department and became a tourist attraction hatched her brood under the watchful eyes of the U.S. Secret Service and took swimmingly to motherhood Sunday, guiding her 11 ducklings unerringly to water with the assistance of at least three government departments.
AFGHANISTAN: Arthur Chrenkoff rounds up under-reported good news from Afghanistan. My favorite may be this: “to make it easier on the voters, 'candidates for Afghanistan's first post-Taliban parliament must choose symbols such as an apple, a ladder or an ice-cream cone to help illiterate voters identify them…'” I've got to say that if a third party ever emerges again in the U.S., it must use an ice cream cone as its symbol. Obviously, the apple is right out, lest you get pummeled by lawyers for Steve Jobs and Yoko Ono.
LOCUSTS: Swarms of locusts blinded drivers, halting traffic along a 25 mile stretch of a highway in Bangladesh. And I feel fine.
